In a strange game of "pass the war criminal", the Sierra Leone Special Court is now requesting that the International Criminal Court in the Hague provide a venue for the trial of alleged war criminal Charles Taylor. This request comes one day after the Sierra Leone Court acquired custody of Mr. Taylor from Liberia, which had only minutes before...
Yesterday the Executive Council of the ASIL passed the following resolution for consideration by the full membership at its annual general meeting later today. As a member of the Executive Council, I am privy to the details of the meeting yesterday. But I will refrain from providing the back story about a meeting that is not open to...
Any of us who have lived long enough know those rare moments when you are part of an event that is unusually special. I had that strong sense today as I watched the opening ceremony of the ASIL annual meeting. It featured Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, ICJ Judge Rosalyn Higgins, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,...
John Bolton is at it again. After getting Security Council agreement on a resolution threatening Iran, he is preparing to push a plan to change the formula for paying U.N. dues. It would base U.N. dues on Purchasing Power Parity rather than gross national product. This sounds complicated, but it would essentially require Russia and China to start...
Although I'm obviously interested in the Court's argument today in Sanchez-Llamas/Bustillo (see related posts below) considering the private rights created by the Vienna Convention, I don't have any thing to add to this very useful account of oral argument by Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog. It sounds like the Court may avoid the self-executing treaty puzzle and impose a duty on...
Charles Taylor, the ex-Liberian leader wanted for war crimes by the Sierra Leone International Court, has been apprehended and transferred to Liberia, the BBC reports. This comes just after President Bush threatened to call off a meeting with the Nigerian leader. The politics of this is no doubt quite murky and will continue to be murky once he gets...
Read this interesting summary by Jeff Jarvis of a speech by Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian. In his speech, Rusbridger is questioning the very future of newspapers. “I love newspapers...
The relentless Ariel Lavinbuk files this report after spending the day at the Supreme Court observing the oral argument today in Hamdan (and then scrambling back up to New Haven to get back to school). The argument he made in Slate yesterday, the Pocket Part, and of course, here on Opinio Juris, was discussed at length today by the...
While I've been obsessively focused on the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of Hamdan, the ICJ has continued plowing through its hearings on Bosnia's case alleging Serbia's responsibility for genocide. As I noted earlier, the ICJ had imposed a weird non-disclosure requirement on those attending its witness testimony this past week. That requirement was lifted today and the hearing...
CSpan has the Hamdan oral argument going. [Actually, the oral argument is best found here at the Georgetown Law School website]. I've been listening to parts of the Katyal argument and he actually invested a substantial amount of time in the argument Ariel Lavinbuk* has been making and we've been discussing here: whether conspiracy is a permissible violation of...
There is an important story developing in Germany about bloggers acting as "whistleblowers" for corporate misconduct. The issue has captured the German blogosphore, with the offending organization, Transparency International, now the top search request on Technorati. The story has been ignored in the MSM and the English blogosphere, but the details are available here. The short version is that a single...
The ubiquitous Neal Katyal, a lawprof at Georgetown, is currently completing his oral argument at the Supreme Court on behalf of Hamdan. In addition to be Hamdan's counsel of record, Katyal is a well-known legal scholar who presented a paper just this last weekend at the Yale Law symposium on executive power. He also has a very readable pragmatic...
